1 Seeking Karuna Amidst Corona seminar

[Princeton University Hindu Life Program]

Video:

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Thank you very much, Vineet, for this opportunity to be with all of you.
If at any time my audio goes down or there is any technical issue, anyone in the audience can just message us and then we will try to correct it. And if you have any questions, you could type it preferably in private to Vineet and then he will forward it to me and I’ll try to answer them. Thank you for joining today.
And our topic is Corona amid Corona. And I’ll talk about this in three broad parts, which is we have three sessions over here. We will be looking at how do we find compassion and how do we gain a better perspective by which we can be compassionate ourselves.
We can see compassion in the outer world and we can become a channel for compassion. So there are three broad themes. Look inside, look up and look ahead.
And based on these three themes, we’ll have the three sessions and each session I will be concluding with one practical exercise and one succinct carry home message. And the practical exercise will be something which you could do as a part of journaling for looking inside, for looking up and looking ahead. So these are the three sessions which I’ll be taking and the overview of what we’re going to take in this session, look inside.
What can we change? What is worth changing and how can we change it? Now, this is a situation of, we could say, unprecedented changes along with, at least in terms of our lived history or our recently experienced history and extraordinary sense of powerlessness. Many of us may be locked in our homes either because of the governmental rules or because of our own decisions for our own safety. The kind of mobility and freedom that we had, not just physically, but also in terms of doing various things that is substantially reduced.
So at such a time, when there is a lot that is not in our control, we begin by looking at what is in our power to change? What can we change? Yeah, can we go ahead? So now when we consider what we can change, this is a universal living condition. So I’m going to draw from the way we are going to do is from rationality to spirituality, from spirituality to the primarily the wisdom of the Gita. I’ll draw from the broad Indic traditions, but specifically I’ll be focussing on the Bhagavad Gita and I will draw some things from some other related sources.
But we will be moving this journey from rationality to spirituality. And when we are talking about looking inside, we are looking at how our vision of ourselves can be one of understanding, of kindness, of compassion. If you want to be compassionate to anyone else, it has to begin with ourselves.
Because among everything that we can influence, the thing that we can influence the most is we ourselves. I’ll come back to this theme. So we’ll talk about how the compassion of the divine manifests in a deeper self-understanding and in the provision of resources that can help us gain that deeper self-understanding.
So the universal living condition is that we exist at the junction of the little in our control and the much out of our control. This is much more evident, say, when we are, when, if, say, we were living in a much more natural setting. That means, say, if we consider the lives of animals, a deer has its fleet-footedness as what is in its control.
But there are predators all around who could pounce and devour it at any moment. So now all of life actually exists. There is little in our control and there is a lot out of our control.
And we exist at the junction trying to leverage what is in our control to further our own survival and our own prosperity. Now, if we were to consider a game, if we consider a game like tennis. Now, within a game like tennis, sometimes the player is serving and sometimes the player is returning.
Suppose the player is returning and at that time the player is returning against an opponent who is basically like an ace machine. You can barely get the racket to the ball. All that you can see is the ball whizzing by.
So at that time, the player who is trying to return can feel helpless. However, one doesn’t have to feel helpless. This is why that phase is not going to go on forever.
It’s not that the other player is going to constantly be serving and we have to just try to return that which is unreturnable. No. So similarly, in our lives, sometimes what is not in our control increases enormously.
The current situation is one such situation where we could say that the unknown that is beyond us is like an ace machine and all that we can do is just somehow get the racket to touch the ball and get the ball back into play if possible. So we exist in the situation, but when you frame it philosophically, that is our constant situation. But in some situations, the what we have in control becomes extremely less.
And the Bhagavad Gita begins by talking about this. This two levels of existence that there is that which is changing and that which is unchanging. na sato vidyate bhavo na bhavo vidyate sathah ubhayor api drishyontas tvanyo sthattva darshibhi So na sato vidyate bhavo that there is changing and of that which is changing, there is no endurance.
And of that which is enduring, there is no change. And the why is see this. So now first I talked about the universal living condition.
And within this universal living condition, there is a distinctive, you could say almost a unique human condition. Can you go ahead? Now what is a human condition is that we live within nature and slightly above nature. Now what do I mean by above nature? It’s clear that we live within nature.
We live above nature in the sense that there is some part of us, something within us, which can observe nature. By nature, I broadly mean the outer world as well as our inner world. And we can access some power by which we can change certain things.
Now we have natural or physical bodies. The word nature as is used in mainstream intellectual discourse, as in used in science. So, for example, we have naturalism.
The naturalism refers to physical or material nature as being the defining reality or even the sole reality. So we have our own biological instincts. We have our psychological drives.
There is something beyond it. No matter how much we reduce the human being and we can go very deep into biology and psychology, but beyond the reduction to the physical, there is something that still remains. Now once a simple evidence of this is that if we consider ourselves as simply a part of nature, there is something distinctive about us because of which we are able to, through a large part of history, we have become the most powerful among the species.
Of course, how we have used that power, constructed or destructed is a different issue. But we are not, we don’t have sharp jaws, sharp teeth like tigers. We don’t have, we don’t run fast like deer or cheetahs.
We don’t have huge bodies like elephants or hippos. But still there is something about us that has elevated us. And this is not just our intelligence that’s definitely there.
But even animals have intelligence to process things. It is that we have a spiritual side which is significantly developed even among those who are not spiritual. We long for something more.
We long to find meaning. We long to find purpose. We long for something lasting.
So although we have our biological drives, we can also examine our biological drives. We can observe them. We can examine them.
We can curtail them. All living beings eat. We humans can, we also need to eat, but we can choose whether to eat or not.
We can fast when we want to, not just because we have to. So why am I talking about this? That this is to be understood that there is a physical side to us, but we have something above which observes. And because it observes, we can think further in the immediate future.
We can plan consciously. But this capacity to plan consciously also has a flip side. That we can also fear unconsciously because we can to some extent disconnect ourselves or distance ourselves more precisely from our physical condition.
So we can see further, see with wisdom, see with knowledge. Now, if there were a pandemic among animals, if a virus would infect them, they wouldn’t really understand what’s happening. They would understand that we are dying and something is causing our death.
But they wouldn’t be able to understand what exactly is happening. They were there. Animal bodies have natural healing mechanisms, but we have a developed system of medicine.
So we, to some extent, although we are physically frail, but we have something within us, which gives us the capacity to change things outside us. I’ll explain this. Can we move ahead? So what can we change and what is worth changing? In life, there are two things, what we live with and what we live for.
If we consider life to be like a car drive, then what we live with is similar to what we drive with. It’s the fuel, the gas. And what we drive for is our destination.
Suppose you see a neighbour coming out or rushing out of their home and rushing toward the car and just racing out. Yeah. So where are you going? I’m going to get put gas in my car.
OK. After that, where will you go? I’ll put, I’ll go to the next gas station to put gas over there. OK.
After that, I’ll go to the next gas station. But where are you going? I’m going to the gas station. There’s something strange over here.
Obviously, if we are to drive, we need gas. But what we drive with is not what we drive for. Usually.
So similarly, you know, in our lives, that’s what we live with and what we live for. What we live with is various resources. It can be our wealth.
We live with, first of all, food. We live with money. We live with various resources, with facilities, with luxuries.
But what we live for is our values and our purposes. So this is what I talked about, the difference between the living condition and the human condition. More or less, for animals, what they live with and what they live for is identical.
That they live for fulfilling their bodily needs and bodily drives. We also do that, but we seek something more. Can you go to the next slide? So what is the context for what we are discussing now? We are trying to understand within a situation of external powerlessness, how can we access power? How can we go within and find some sense of perspective and power there? So what we live with and what we live for.
Now, when we keep improving what we live with, that leads to external development and that gives us outer power. And when we improve, enrich, enhance what we live with, that leads to internal development and that gives us inner power. Over the last few centuries, we have had phenomenal scientific development and that has given us access to outer power of the kind that we would not have, even royalty wouldn’t have dreamt about a few centuries ago.
We have aeroplanes, we have telecommunication, we have air conditioning. So all this is indicative that we have extraordinary outer power. So what we now, outer power is largely associated with what we live for.
It’s what we live with. Inner power refers to what we live for. So we can say resources and purposes.
Can we go ahead? So when now, when what we live with becomes what we live for, we soon end up with nothing to live for. Of course, within also we have nothing to live for. But what that means is that if somebody starts living only for eating, OK, you can eat, you can eat.
But how long? If somebody decides that, OK, my only goal in life is to earn money, that’s good. We all need money. But when what we live with becomes what we live for, eventually we find that life starts becoming meaningless.
Life starts becoming very superficial. So then what I said till now, I’ll be summarising in one diagram. Can you go ahead now? Yeah.
Oh, OK. This diagram has not come out. I exported at the PDF.
The diagram didn’t come out properly. So basically what is there is on the X axis is inner power, on the Y axis is outer power. So inner power low or high, outer power low or high.
So when we have low inner power and low outer power, that’s the time when we are ineffective. Whatever we do, it’s just we can’t do much. We are more or less helpless.
We are powerless. Now, when that is a state of misery and we have no inner power and no outer power and we need to get out of that, then this is a stage where we just find it unbearable to live like this. So to some extent, the situation that we are in, many of us might feel that we are in this first quadrant.
But suddenly we have active, busy lives and suddenly we have been reduced to a situation of great powerlessness. So now when we get out of this first quadrant, we can go to any of the other three quadrants. Now, if we focus on gaining outer power, that means we go, we rise up.
So then what happens? We have lot of outer power, but low inner power. Remember, the X axis is inner power, the Y axis is outer power. So when we go up to the, if we start from the left bottom as quadrant 1, quadrant 2, quadrant 3, quadrant 4, then now a lot of outer power without much inner power can be destructed.
Perhaps the most graphic example of this could be, say, the school shooters who haunt the American imagination, especially within the educational system. There can be people with wild minds and powerful machines. Martin Luther King predicted this several decades ago when he said that we have guided missiles and misguided men.
Our technological power has outrun our spiritual power. So at such a time, we end up becoming destructive. We have outer power and less inner power.
And to a large extent, human society, for the last several centuries, has concentrated on gaining outer power. And by gaining outer power, we have transformed our outer world. But in the process, many of us have not focused on gaining inner power.
So that’s one way we may go out from quadrant 1 to quadrant 2, that is we gain outer power. And that’s what humanity has done. But there are situations like the current situation we are in, where we are thrust out of that quadrant 2. Now, when we are thrust out of that, the outer power that we have becomes extremely limited.
Then where do we fall back? Now, either we might sink back. If outer power is the only power we thought of as power, then we might feel ourselves powerless. Now, when I am talking about powerless or we not having much outer power, I am talking about this more at an individual level, at a scientific and technological level.
We have researchers and medical healthcare professionals who are working extremely hard to treat people, to find out, to care for people who can’t be treated and to find out some medicines to cure it, to vaccinate us from it eventually. So this is important. The pursuit of outer power is also important, no doubt about it.
However, we at individual level are in a situation right now where we don’t have much outer power. There’s not much we can do about the situation we are in, in terms of externally altering the situation. So that’s why our first topic’s title was Go Within, Look Within.
And when we do this, what exactly are we trying to do? We understand that that second quadrant is somewhere where our primary focus has been individually as well as communally as human society to gain more and more outer power. Now, if somebody has, if he can’t go to the second quadrant, then we can go to the other, if you say, the third quadrant is the green one over here. So 1, 2, 3, 4. So third quadrant is when we are under effective.
So we have inner power, but not much outer power. So at least we can manage, we can control our emotions, our inner world. So now because we can’t do much in the outer world, so we may not be as effective as we would like to be.
But that doesn’t mean that we have no power. Now the most effective individuals are those who have both inner and outer power. So they can manage, they understand their own values and purposes.
So in terms of what we live with and what we live for, we could say outer power is to have resources with us, to what we live with that we have abundantly. And inner power is what we live for. Our values, our purposes are clear to us.
So when there is this marriage of purposes and resources of inner power and outer power, that is the time when we are most effective. So now how can we, so we are talking about look within and then we are looking at, we look at through parts. What can we change and what is worth changing? So what can we change? We have something which we can change, we discussed that and largely our energy has been focused on changing our external.
So what we live with. Now how can we change what we live for? So I’ll use this acronym GET to explain this. That how, so the essence of say scientific or technological growth is to give us outer power.
The essence of spiritual growth is to give us inner power. And situations like this, we can see divine compassion and we can have compassion on ourselves by accessing inner power, by seeking to grow spiritually. So GET is G E T, gain self-understanding, experience inner peace and tap spiritual power.
Gain self-understanding. Can we go ahead? Now the Bhagavad Gita for self-understanding, it offers, it’s a very empowering guidebook. And it says that our existence has three levels, body, mind and soul, consciousness, spirit.
These are not exactly interchangeable terms, but for our purposes, we can see them as synonymous spirit, consciousness, soul. So the one way to understand this is through a metaphor of software. The body is like the hardware, the mind is the software and the soul is the user.
So within the hardware, within the hardware, there is a lot that we have improved through technology. So at the physical level, we have comforts, we have facilities far, far better than in the past. Now we are going to talk at the level of the mind and at the level of the spirit.
What is it that is possible for us to do? So at the level of the hardware, now at individually, there is not much we can do. At the level of the body, not much is in our control. When we talk about outer power and inner power, we look at the level of the mind and at the level of the soul.
What is it that we can do? Now sometimes the mind and the soul are equated. So anything above the body or beyond the physical is often thought of as spiritual. That’s why we have mind-body medicine or mind over matter.
It’s a common phrase. And the idea over there is that there is something beyond the physical and that we call as the mind. Now it is true the mind is beyond the physical.
So the Gita differentiates between the mental and the spiritual. And the idea is that in the inner world, there are multiple levels. In the inner world, I’ll repeat this, there are multiple levels.
That’s why sometimes we may see that we do certain things and we wonder why did I do that? And it’s not that somebody from outside prompted us to do it. We ourselves felt like doing it and we did it. But then later on we thought why shouldn’t I have done this? So it’s almost like there are two persons within us.
One more impulsive, the other more reflective. And sometimes the impulsive person wins. And then after that the reflective person wonders what happened.
So we could say the impulsive side within us is the mind and the part of us which can abstract from ourselves and observe ourselves. We can observe our mind also. That part which is who we essentially are is the soul.
So the Bhagavad Gita talks about this dual sense of the self in one of its most enigmatic verses that is 6.5 uddhare dātmanātmānaṁ nātmānaṁ avasādayet ātmaiva yātmanobandhur ātmaiva ripurātmanah It says elevate yourself with yourself. Don’t degrade yourself with yourself. The self is the friend of the self and the self is also the enemy of the self.
Now this dual sense of the self is best understood by that one self is the mind. So the mind is like a software and the software keeps giving us pop-ups. Do this.
Try this out. Watch this. Do that.
And if we get caught in whatever pop-ups come up over there then we get distracted. We get lost. So for us we will explore this dual sense of the self later.
But for gaining inner power if we don’t have this understanding of the difference between the mind and the soul then sometimes we find that we are our worst enemies. In say in times like these where we are physically restricted constrained in what we can do. This is a time to go within.
But unless we have a proper understanding of what going within means we might find that our inside is a flickering, turbulent and misleading mess. Now we have all kinds of drives and cravings and urges and wild emotions going on inside us at times. So to go within means we have to go deep within.
Go beyond the mind to the essence. The essence of who we are, to the soul. Can you go ahead? So what this means is that we are talking about the acronym GET.
G E T. This is the concluding part of what we are discussing. So gain self-understanding. The self-understanding is what? As spiritual beings we are eternal.
That beyond our virus prone bodies we are virus proof souls. That we exist from our bodies. Our bodies are associated with our physical situations.
Our minds are associated with various emotions. But we exist beyond our bodies and beyond our minds. We exist as spiritual beings.
So there is a part of us which is eternal, which is indestructible. There is a part of us which exists beyond the ups and downs of daily life. And it is that part which we need to seek, which we need to situate ourselves in.
In fact that is not a part, that is the essence of who we are. So to give an example, somebody might be caught in a virtual reality where say they are watching a movie in which lot of say violent, destructive action is happening. And it’s not just a movie they are watching.
Say they are playing a simulation. Now when they are playing a simulation within a video game or a virtual reality, there might be many prompts that come. Ok do this, do this, do this.
Ok that. Say you are in a car chase, turn left or turn right. Some prompts might come up.
But it is we who choose. So the simulated world is the physical world. And the programme that helps us to act in the simulation is the mental world, is the mind.
But we exist beyond both of these. So we exist above our situations and above our emotions. So if we gain the spiritual self-understanding that we are indestructible beings and the knowledge that we are indestructible can empower us.
Our situations are meant to be like carpets. The carpet is what helps us to, the carpet is what helps us to, it softens the ground below us. But imagine the carpet came above us.
Then we would, two things will happen. We will feel blinded and we will feel suffocated. Similarly when our circumstances start coming above us, they start overwhelming us, then we feel suffocated and blinded.
And today’s situation can be like that. We might feel, what can I do? We feel suffocated, we feel blinded. But by gaining self-understanding we can rise above our situations and above our emotions.
So that was G. Can you go ahead? E is experience inner peace. Now one is the intellectual understanding that I am a spiritual being who exists beyond my situations, beyond my emotions. But how do I access that? The way to access it is that by practising meditation.
Meditation is an elevator for our consciousness. Meditation is something which, just like if we had a multi-level building, there is a three level say, then we can climb up or we can take a elevator up. When we take the elevator up, we rise, rise, rise, rise to the top level.
So similarly by meditation we can raise our consciousness to the spiritual level. We can experience ourselves as different from our situations and our emotions. And thereby we can gain, we can find peace within ourselves.
There are various forms of meditation. In our tradition we use the power of sonic meditation. We use sound as a tool, sound in specific forms called mantras as tools for raising our consciousness.
So now go ahead. So G, E, get. How can we get that inner power? T is tap.
Tap inner power. So that means that once we understand our existence is three levels, body, mind and soul. At the level of the body, at the level, physical level, there is danger for us and the danger we have to be aware of it.
So we will have to live with anxiety, with fear. We may have to live with fear. We don’t have to live in fear.
If we conceive of ourselves simply as physical beings, then the destruction of our physique, of our body is the destruction of our body. We live in fear. But when we understand that actually our existence is multilevel and there is a core to us which is indestructible.
There is a shell which is destructible and we want to take care of that. So there is, so fear itself is not a bad thing. Fear alerts us to danger.
Fear prepares us for facing uncertain situations. So we may have to live with fear, but we don’t have to live in fear. Fear won’t consume our consciousness.
Fear will be a component in our consciousness, not the container of our consciousness. And then we address the situations that are causing us fear with our self-understanding, by leveraging whatever power we do have with us. So we can see the compassion of the Divine in giving us the resources to look within, to gain self-understanding, to experience inner peace, to tap inner power.
And by that we can face the outer world with greater confidence. So this would be some suggestion for you. In each of these I will give you something to journal.
So basically things have to be intellectually analysed and then they have to be personally experienced. So during the course of the day we are trying to understand what we live with and what we live for. We try to differentiate the two.
Quite often we live in an externally driven sense and we feel a lot of emotions associated with the external world. So what are the emotions you feel most strongly? Attribute them to your mind and articulate them. That means, say, in a day, maybe at the end of the day or maybe at 3-4 hours, we are trying to do some self-reflection.
Okay, what did I feel? That time when I heard about this particular thing, I felt panic. When I heard about this, I felt some hope. When I heard about this particular news, when I heard about that, I felt annoyance, I felt anger.
So the very act of articulating our emotions helps us to distance ourselves from them and analyse them. So basically we have our spiritual core, but currently we are not invested in our spiritual core. We are invested in something else.
So what is it that we are more emotionally invested in presently that we are trying to understand by what are the emotions that we feel most strongly. And then we understand these emotions come from our mind. They come up as pop-ups.
Something pops up on our computer screen and we get consumed by it. We get excited by it. But is that really worth getting excited about? Is that what we really want to do? So what are the emotions you feel most strongly? And then contrast that with what are the things that matter the most to you.
So at this stage, of course, for us, our well-being, health matters. The health of our loved ones matters. That is, of course, we are taking care of that.
But what are the things that really matter for us? If we had just a month to live, what would we really want to do? What are the things that matter to us the most? They are who we are. They attribute them to your soul and articulate them. And the greater the distance between what we feel most strongly about and what matters most to us, the greater the distance between the two, the more we will feel disoriented and disempowered when external things go wrong.
But when the closer the two come together, what we feel strongly about is also what matters the most to us. Then we will find that we will gain greater sense of power. We will be able to tap our inner power.
So at least what we will be able to do is refocus when things that don’t matter so much to us, when our emotions get trapped in that, we can refocus ourselves and come back to where we should be. So I’ll summarise what I spoke and then we can have a few questions. I started by speaking today about how can we find corona, compassion amid the corona crisis.
And we did this in three sessions. Look within, look up and look ahead. So we focused today on look within.
And the idea is compassion has to begin with compassion for ourselves. Even the divine compassion has to be seen, can be seen in terms of the vision by which we can gain greater self-understanding. So our session focused on look within.
And why do we need to look within? We decided in terms of what can we change. So what can we change? We talked about the living, universal living condition is that we exist at the junction between what is change, between much that is beyond our control and little that is in our control. But the unique human condition is that though we exist within nature, we exist slightly above nature.
We can regulate our impulses. We can examine our drives. And we articulated this in terms of the next point.
What is worth changing? Animals largely live for what they live with, the bodily needs. But we human beings also have an important aspect what we live for. It’s like we drive for getting, drive to, we need fuel to drive with, but we need some destination to drive for, to go toward.
Now technological progress is, as what is, by external progress we get outer power. By inner, by inner or spiritual progress we get inner power. And we talked about how the four quadrant diagram that if there is no outer power and no inner power, in quadrant one we are powerless, we feel miserable and we want to get out of that situation as quickly as possible.
One way to get out of it is to go up. To the spiritual, where we gain more and more outer power. And that’s what humanity has done in the last few centuries.
But sometimes we just don’t have that outer power. Then what do we do? Then we might just feel ourselves powerless. So we could go to the third quadrant.
That is have inner power even if we don’t have outer power. We are under effective, but still we are growing internally. And the optimal situation is where we have inner and outer power.
So we are discussing how we can go toward quadrant four, that is outer power and inner power through our journey. And then I talked about how to get, what can we, how can we change what we can change. I talked about three things.
The get acronym, gain self-understanding. How the Gita offers us a resource that illumines our inner world. It’s like a flashlight.
Our existence is still our body, mind and spirit. So beyond our virus prone bodies we are virus proof souls. And we exist above our situations and our emotions.
Understanding this itself and experiencing it through practises like meditation can help us experience inner peace. And then we can tap inner power. How do we tap that spiritual power? By understanding that it’s a situation, fear is going to be there.
But fear can be a part of our consciousness, not the whole of our consciousness. We may have to live with fear, but not in fear. And to differentiate between this with fear and in fear, we discussed about, try to understand through journaling where we are emotionally invested and where we want to, what is there actually matters for us.
So the lesser the gap between what triggers our emotions and what matters the most to us, therein we will be able to tap more and more inner power and move forward in our lives. So thank you very much. Are there any questions or comments? One of the things that I think many of us are struggling with, particularly when it comes to experiencing that fear, is less fear for ourselves and more, as I think you mentioned, fear for our loved ones, particularly those in very vulnerable situations.
And so it seems to be, it’s a little challenging when hearing teachings that seem to emphasise that we are the indestructible self and not the body. It can seem from a certain angle to be a little bit dismissive of the real dangers that exist. Even though we know theoretically, okay, our loved ones are also, as you said, virus-proof selves or souls, but we relate to them in their embodied state and we love them and we feel that connection to them in that embodied state.
So isn’t it a little dismissive or hard-hearted to not care about them in that embodied state and to not experience that fear for them? Yeah, that’s a very important point that we may not, if we say that everybody is a spiritual being, but we connect with people at the embodied level, our loved ones. So should we not care for them or are we dismissing their physical side? Not exactly dismissing, we need to contextualise. That means that at one level, if you look at the wisdom of the Gita, the Gita begins with a radical matter-spirit dualism.
This is matter, this is spirit. But while there is separation in the beginning, if we see as it moves forward, it moves from separation toward integration. Integration means the body and the soul, they work together as one cohesive unit.
And when we care for our loved ones, now we care for the complete person. And right now, for us in the embodied condition, the physical self is important for us because that’s what is essential for our functioning. We relate with each other.
If somebody treats us simply as a physical creature, that also leads to a very unfulfilling relationship. Now when people have relationships based on only physical drives, then people start feeling I am being treated like a, treated like basically a robot, a machine, a bendable robot which is used for gratifying one’s desire. So if we reduce people to physical creatures, then also we can’t have very fulfilling relationships.
But if we reduce people solely to the spiritual level and neglect their physical, then we are reflecting an incomplete or incorrect understanding of the nature of our present condition. So when we care for someone, we care for their complete being. And the complete being means body, mind and soul together.
So there is danger and the danger has to be taken, has to be addressed. So now what about, are we being dismissive? As I said, if we would be dismissive, I would have said that, you know, we don’t have to have any fear because we are not the body. I said not that we may have to live with fear, but not in fear.
And we want to help our loved ones. We want to care for them. And the best way we can care for them is to help them also to expand their consciousness so that fear may be a part, but it doesn’t have to be the whole.
And so I would say both extremes, reducing our loved ones to simply the physical bodies or reducing them to simply the spiritual souls without considering their embodied condition, both are unhealthy extremes. And a holistic understanding is where we care for the complete person. And there are times when, say, during the normal functioning, we may not consider so much the physical self, we consider the normal person, but there are times when somebody is sick.
Then the way we care for them is by caring for their physical side, physical body. There are times when that is what we relate with more. So this will vary depending on situation.
But the idea is we care for the complete person. I’ll just read a question that noise is going on on their side. But someone is asking, how would you respond to the idea that spiritualists are being selfish or indulgent by focussing on meditation at a time when so many people are in need of help? OK.
So are we, are spiritualists being selfish by focussing on meditation? Well, if it is in the fourth four quadrants, if somebody stays stuck in the third quadrant and doesn’t at all come to the fourth quadrant, third quadrant is inner power, but no outer power. And somebody worst is that they’re not even in the third quadrant. They’re actually in the first quadrant, but pretending to be in the third quadrant.
That means one is not even developing inner power, but one is using meditation as a way to escape from the outer world. Then as a way to evade one’s responsibilities, that is unhealthy. There are some people who do this, but that’s not what spirituality is all about.
If we consider the Bhagavad Gita, it is about a warrior, Arjuna, who had a serious responsibility and he wanted to flee from that responsibility. The Bhagavad Gita told him, no, you can have a spiritual vision inside, but you make your material contribution outside. So meditation is meant to help us gain inner power so that we can contribute externally.
Now, how exactly in what situation one contribute, that will vary. So is it that we just meditate and don’t do anything else? No, we try to contribute to society in whatever way we can. And meditation is also one way.
Now, if we consider in today’s world, while people, while a lot of practical help is needed, but more important than that is fear management. Now, resource management is important thing, but fear and if it grips people, it can go towards panic. And once it goes towards panic, it can often, when we are panicky, then our reaction to a problem becomes a bigger problem than the problem itself.
It’s like, say, if there is fire in a closed, crowded place, like, say, a movie theatre and the fire causes some casualties, but the stampede when people try to flee from it causes greater casualties. So we don’t want panic at this stage. And our spirituality is a means by which we can gain inner power and with that inner power, we can contribute in the outer world.
So if meditation is used as a tool to escape from the outer world, then that is unhealthy. But if meditation is seen as a tool to prepare ourselves so that we can contribute better in the outer world, then that is the healthy and proper way of accessing our spirituality. If anyone has any questions, please do go ahead and unmute yourself and you can ask directly.
Or if you feel more comfortable, you can send it to me through the private chat feature in the chat window. I have a question. Does it make sense to feel that empowering to get rid of the fear of our existence by accepting that our soul, we are where we have to be at each time? So accepting our reality, would that make sense? Oh, yes, definitely.
Will accepting that where we are is where we are meant to be help us to deal with fear? Get rid of fear? Yes, definitely. In fact, that is going to be our next session. Look up.
Look up means where we are going to see how there is not only a spiritual core to us, but there is a spiritual purpose to existence and to what happens. And the universe moves purposefully. So we now, I wouldn’t say we will get rid of fear because when we talk about getting rid of something, we consider that as something which is bad, unwanted garbage and get rid of it.
Well, fear is not itself garbage. Fear is a natural and necessary, necessary pointer to danger. If there were no fear, we would get ourselves into danger and trouble unnecessarily.
If a child peers down a 100 level building through a window or from the terrace and the child feels no fear, the mother will feel great fear. What are you doing? So people who are, there is a difference between being courageous and being foolhardy. So people who don’t feel any fear at all, that’s not a very, we will put ourselves in very dangerous situations unnecessarily.
So we shouldn’t think that fear itself is a bad thing, but rather being dominated by fear is a bad thing. So I sometimes differentiate between fear and fearfulness. Now, fear will be there whenever there is uncertainty, whenever there is great uncertainty, there will be a certain amount of fear.
But fearfulness is when we are dominated by that fear. So, yes, when we understand the universe moves purposefully and we are at a place which is optimised for our spiritual evolution, then we will not be gripped by or driven by fear. We will be able to respond more maturely.
Thank you. There’s a question received over chat. And the question is asking if you wouldn’t mind and if you feel comfortable, if you could share your most strongly felt emotions around the coronavirus crisis.
And as you spoke of attributing to the mind and soul, if you could share how you articulated these strongly felt emotions for yourself and what you kind of attributed to mind and attributed to soul. OK. Yeah.
So my emotions and how I attributed them. Over the last, say, couple of weeks or so, I was on a speaking tour and I was in Australia and then New Zealand and then I was supposed to go to Australia and then come to America. But then I had to cancel that.
And I’m now back in India. So there’s a significant amount of changes which I had to do. So I would say my emotions have been three main emotions.
Annoyance, amazement and alarm. So initially when my travel schedule got disrupted, I was annoyed by it. Then as I’m seeing amazement, not in the sense of amusement, but amazement simply in the sense of how the whole world with its huge economy, with its great power can be brought to a standstill.
And then alarm has been there because it’s an alarming situation in some ways. So I would say that the way I dealt with it is that I am trying to grow spiritually myself and share resources for spiritual growth. And if I keep that as my purpose.
So there is, as I said, what we live with and what we live for. So travelling around, speaking, making various plans by which I could do these things. This is the external part.
And when the external part is not, suddenly the control is taken away. Then what is it that really matters for me? So ultimately I feel that what I share primarily is spiritual resources through sound. By speaking and writing is also through sound.
So and it’s not just when I’m speaking, I try to, I’m not speaking to others alone. I’m speaking in a sense primarily to myself. Because when we speak, we understand us.
We understand things better. We assimilate them more. So I’m trying to recognise that.
I’m trying to remind myself and refocus that although the external arrangements have been disrupted for me, but the core purpose of what I was trying to do, that is to share spiritual resources for raising one’s consciousness, my own consciousness and others consciousness. That I can do even without being able to necessarily physically travel. After I came back from New Zealand, I have been in self-isolation.
So I was at one level probably the previous 14 days. In one week I must have travelled thousands of miles. And now in the last one week, I haven’t even got out of my room.
So the externals can change drastically. But if this is the change in the external, sometimes we get so caught in the externals that we forget what is the purpose we are doing it for. So I’m trying to take this opportunity to come closer to my purpose, which is to deepen my connection with spiritual sound.
Spiritual sound refers to mantras, spiritual sound refers to the wisdom texts as they are articulated. And as through speaking, through writing, I’m trying to connect myself more and trying to share that connection more with others. I hope that helps.
Thank you. Much on the spot or embarrassing you in any way, but also I hope you’re doing well on the physical level. I know many of us who have known you for some time know that in this life you faced a number of health challenges as well.
And so, you know, definitely feeling some concern around that and hoping that. Yeah, just hoping that you’re in a safe, protected space. And it sounds like you are.
Yeah. Isolation is a good thing right now. Yes, I am.
Thank you for your concern. And I hope that you and your family are also doing well. Thank you for this session.
And of course, we’ll continue tomorrow from 11 to noon. And then again, for the session on Sunday from 11 to noon. Would you just take a minute or two to give us a little bit of a sneak preview of what we might examine tomorrow and on Sunday? OK.
Yeah. So when you talk about tomorrow, as I said, look up. We’ll try to understand the role of divinity in the shaping of things in our life.
So tomorrow I’ll be talking about. Today I talk about this acronym GET. Tomorrow I’ll be talking about an acronym called ACT, which will be more about how we look at the nature of the divine and make sense of things in terms of how they happen in life and why they happen.
So there is, I’ll talk about destiny, free will, and I’ll talk about evil and free will in that context. So the focus will be in tomorrow’s session on, we look at, look within to understand our situation. But we look at the big picture.
And then we try to face, try to place ourselves within that big picture by understanding that the reality, the totality of reality is ultimately congenial, it’s not hostile. And in the last session, I’ll be talking about some practical steps that we can take when we are facing life challenges. We’ll talk about, look ahead, how, whether we should look long term, we should look short term.
And how can we take practical steps to move on when we are in situations of fear and uncertainty. So thank you very much for joining today. I look forward to being with you tomorrow and day after.